Catholicism enjoys unimaginable influence in America – but it faces a new crisis

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Michael W. Higgins is the Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College and a senior fellow of Massey College.

Every day, sentient Canadians react to what is going on south of the border with a mix of befuddlement, rage and corrosive worry.

With the erosion of values, civility, historical insight and philosophical wisdom, we are dangerously adrift, subject to endless cheap gibes by boorish incompetents, polished sycophants and bullish clowns. We understand viscerally what many – if not most – Americans continue to experience with a numbing dread: the dying of their culture.

The poison of mockery and the torrent of vapidity that engulf us hourly are only too reminiscent of those policies deployed by the dictators of the 1930s: the dehumanization of the other, the crackdown on immigrants both undocumented and documented, the reduction of political discourse to negative soundbites, the concentrated alignment of interests in an ideological elite that delights in trivializing the suffering of others and that dreams of territorial expansion or lebensraum.

And during this tumultuous time – also coincident with the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States – we have a concatenation of circumstances that lead to something the founders would certainly never have anticipated: the ascendancy of Catholicism as the country’s premier religion.

At its birth, America, as much the product of Protestantism as the Enlightenment, had little tolerance for popery. Catholics were a desperate minority in the Thirteen Colonies and with the exception of Maryland – founded by the Catholic Cecil Calvert, Baron Baltimore – they had very little sure footing in a political environment that distrusted the old continent and the old faith.

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For centuries Catholics remained a minority voice in the country’s affairs, persecuted by the Ku Klux Klan, maligned by the political powers and excluded from centres of influence. But they flourished in their own way by establishing an unparalleled system of institutions – parochial schools, universities, hospitals, churches with specific attention paid to the many ethnicities from traditional Catholic countries – and by aligning with the political players, Democrats mostly, who recognized their growing demographic.

From 1960 on, following the election of the country’s first Catholic President, John F. Kennedy, Catholics were infused with a new confidence and in the subsequent decades moved from marginal to core status in the political makeup of the country.

And so, in this semiquincentennial year and midway through the second Trump administration, we find Catholicism at the apex of the nation’s governance apparatus: Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, six of the nine supreme court justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, one third of the Trump cabinet and around 40 per cent of the state governors. It is a denomination that is now the largest in the country, with the second-largest composed of self-identified ex-Catholics. From being a faith communion whose political loyalties were suspect, a residue of European hegemony ill-suited to the new world with its pioneer spirit and republican convictions, it has now ascended the ladder and arrived.

But arrived where?

Enter Constantine the Great.

It strikes me that something can be learned by looking at Donald Trump through a Constantinian lens, although at first glance they are so dissimilar as to defy comparison.

Constantine was a 4th-century emperor at a time when the Roman Empire was involved in some very heavy shape-shifting exercises. Mr. Trump is emperor-like and also involved in some political rearranging but shorn of strategy and vision. Constantine was a great military figure in fact, and Mr. Trump a great military figure in his mind only.

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But there is one area in which their political behaviour bears comparison. Constantine formally recognized Christianity on legal grounds, discontinued state persecution of Christians and presided over a process that culminated in the church being recognized, if not de jure certainly de facto, as the religion of the empire. Theologians and historians debate the motivations and political and ecclesiastical stratagems involved, but all concede that the Constantinian embrace of Christianity has had lasting repercussions.

Certainly, the convergence of empire and church allowed both to survive in a dark time of dissolution. The legitimation of the church as a player in the imperium and the institutionalizing of its message of salvation guaranteed centuries of mutually enriching accommodation.

But there is a price to the Constantinian pact: the subjection of the church’s prophetic and rebellious genius to the enticing assurances of power.

And so now that Catholicism enjoys hitherto unimaginable influence in the corridors of American power, having through its clerical and lay leadership found a way to accommodate Trumpism, it must now face a new crisis: the survival of its credibility.

As American Catholic professors of philosophy David Albertson and Jason Blakely recently – and scorchingly – observed: “Catholic bishops, institutes, journals, and influencers have learned to quietly accept the excesses of the MAGA movement because they detect in it a sympathetic tone, a recognizable and consoling mood and posture. Trump may attack democracy, harm the global poor, and steal from the Treasury, but at least he is antiwoke.”

The Faustian bargain Mr. Trump negotiated with several Catholic leaders with the revocation of Roe v. Wade, and the stacking of the judiciary with conservative Catholics, has long since frayed.

A rising number of Catholics have come to realize that there is something more threatening than wokeism, and it is called tyranny. The cost of a Constantinian concordat is nothing short of losing your soul.

There is an alternative voice to the MAGA Catholics: the moral and prophetic witness of Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day celebrated by Pope Francis in his address to Congress on Sept. 24, 2015.

And picking up on his predecessor’s pastoral priorities, Leo XIV, the American pope, highlighted the singular courage of Ms. Day, the radical Catholic anarchist and pacifist, when he noted last year that she “understood that for too many, the [American] dream was a nightmare, and that as a Christian she had to get involved with workers, with migrants, with those discarded by an economy that kills.”

MAGA Catholics need to heed their Chicago-born pope and forsake the new triumphalism of Mr. Trump’s U.S. Catholicism.